SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

By Frank S. Nugent

Published: January 14, 1938

Sheer fantasy, delightful, gay, and altogether captivating, touched the screen yesterday when Walt Disney's long-awaited feature-length cartoon of the Grimm fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, had its local premiere at the Radio City Music Hall. Let your fears be quieted at once: Mr. Disney and his amazing technical crew have outdone themselves. The picture more than matches expectations. It is a classic, as important cinematically as The Birth of a Nation or the birth of Mickey Mouse. Nothing quite like it has been done before; and already we have grown impolite enough to clamor for an encore. Another helping, please!

You can visualize it best if you imagine a child, with a wondrous, Puckish imagination, nodding over his favorite fairy tale and dreaming a dream in which his story would come true. He would see Snow White, victim of the wicked Queen's jealousy, dressed in rags, singing at her work quite unmindful of the Magic Mirror's warning to the Queen that the Princess, not she, was now the "fairest in the land." Then he would see Snow White's banishment from the castle, her fearful flight from the hobgoblins of the forest, her adoption by all the friendly little creatures of the wood, and her refuge at the home of the seven dwarfs.

And then, if this child had a truly marvelous imaginationthe kind of impish imagination that Mr. Disney and his men possesshe might have seen the seven dwarfs as the picture sees them. There are Doc, who sputters and twists his words, and Happy, who is a rollicking little elf, and Grumpy, who is terribly grumpyat firstand Sleepy, who drowses, and Sneezy, who acts like a volcano with hay fever, and Bashful, who blushes to the roots of his long white beard, and Dopey. Dopey really deserves a sentence all by himself. No, we'll make it a paragraph, because Dopey is here to stay.

Dopey is the youngest of the seven dwarfs. He is beardless, with a buttony nose, a wide mouth, beagle ears, cross-purpose eyes, and the most disarming, winning, helpless, puppy-dog expression that creature ever had. If we had to dissect him, we'd say he was one part little Benny of the comic strips, one part Worry-Wart of the same, and one part Pluto, of the Mickey Mouse Plutos. There may, too, be just a dash of Harpo Marx. But he's all Dopey, forever out of step in the dwarfs' processions, doomed to carry the red taillight when they go to their jewel mines, and speechless. As Doc explains, "He never tried to talk."

So there they are, all seven of them, to protect the little Princess from her evil stepmother, the Queen, to dance and frolic and cavortwith the woodland creaturesin comic Disneyesque patterns, and ultimately to keep vigil at Snow White's glass-and-gold coffin until Prince Charming imprints "love's first kiss" upon her lips and so releases her from the sleeping death that claimed her after she ate the witch's poisoned apple. For this, you know, is partly the story of Sleeping Beauty.

But no child, of course, could dream a dream like this. For Mr. Disney's humor has the simplicity of extreme sophistication. The little bluebird who overreaches itself and hits a flat note to the horror of its parents; the way the animals help Snow White clean house, with the squirrels using their tails as dusters, the swallows scalloping pies with their feet, the fawns licking the plates clean, the chipmunks twirling cobwebs about their tails and pulling free; or the ticklish tortoise when the rabbits use his ribbed underside as a scrubbing boardall these are beyond a youngster's imagination, but not beyond his delight.

And technically it is superb. In some of the early sequences there may be an uncertainty of line, a jerkiness in the movements of the Princess; but it is corrected later and hand and lip movements assume an uncanny reality. The dwarfs and animals are flawless from the start. Chromatically, it is far and away the best Technicolor to date, achieving effects possible only to the cartoon, obtainingthrough the multiplane cameraan effortless third dimension. You'll not, most of the time, realize you are watching animated cartoons. And if you do, it will be only with a sense of amazement.

Nor can any description overlook so important a Disney element as the score. There are eight songssolos, duets, choruseswhich perfectly counterpoint the action. In the traditional ballad manner are "The Wishing Well Song," "Some Day My Prince Will Come," and "One Song." Livelier is the dwarfs' theme, "Hi-Ho," "Whistle While You Work," "The Washing Song," and "Isn't This a Silly Song." We've lost one or two, but no great matter. They're gay and friendly and pleasant, all of them, and so is the picture. If you miss it, you'll be missing one of the ten best pictures of 1938. Thank you very much, Mr. Disney, and come again soon.